There are currently many websites that allow users to create online collections of photos (usually called “albums”), and then share these albums with one or many recipients. When a user wants to share a set of photos, they need to perform the following set of tasks: 1. upload the image(s) into a particular album; 2. go to a web browser and go to the photo sharing website; 3. select the album that contains the new photos; 4. select/enter the e-mail addresses for the desired recipients; and 5. send the message. While this is a straightforward process, it actually requires a lot of work on the part of the user. In particular, the upload process normally takes a long time, so that the user must endure a long wait before they can proceed to steps 2-5. Also, step 4 can be cumbersome, particularly for users who like to share their photos with large groups. Also, every time that the user wants to share new photos, they must go through the entire process again.
The current state of the art is also problematic for recipients. Since each photo-share is sent as a separate message, a recipient can quickly become overwhelmed with multiple share e-mails, and will not be able to keep track of which photos came in which message. In addition, many people have multiple e-mail addresses, so that they must check several accounts in order to manage all of their incoming photo shares.
A system and a method made in accordance with the present invention was developed to simplify the image sharing process as described above. It should be noted that this system and method can easily be applied to any types of digital media (including video, audio, text, etc.) there is nothing about it that is specific to images. Users are provided the ability to create a higher-level organization (called a “folder”). A folder will be able to hold one or many albums, and serves as a convenient way for users to organize their albums. This invention allows the owner of a folder to associate a “notification list” with the folder (a set of e-mail addresses and/or phone #s). When the user chooses to upload photos, they will have the option to upload them to an album that is in the folder. Once this is done, the server will automatically queue a notification for everyone on the notification list for the folder. For example, the steps of this process includes: user creates a new folder; user selects/enters the notification list for the folder; user uploads a set of images into an album in the folder (this can be a new album or an existing album); and once the upload completes, a notification message is automatically queued for each of the recipients; at some point (as described later), the notification message is sent.
For the user, there are two primary advantages to this approach. First, the user does not have to wait until the upload is complete to finish the sharing task. All of the work required from the user can be done before the upload is initiated. Since the upload is usually the most time-consuming step of the process, this is a major advantage. Second, when the user wants to send more photos to the same recipients, they only have to upload more photos to the shared folder. The notification message is sent automatically by the image services provider.
In addition, each recipient may manage their own “notification preferences”. In particular, the recipient can choose how often they would like to receive notifications (for example: never, every time new content is added to a folder, once a day, once a week, etc.). In this way, the recipient can ensure that they will not be overwhelmed by too many incoming e-mails. If the recipient chooses a periodic notification scheme (such as “once a week”), then all of their notifications are consolidated in a single e-mail once a week. So, if person A is subscribed to folder X, folder Y and folder Z, then A will receive one e-mail per week which will inform them of any new content available in any of the three folders.
Also, the recipient will be able to enter multiple e-mail addresses, and can select one of them as the “primary address” (of course, phone numbers or other addressable identifiers can be used instead of e-mail addresses). In this case, all of the shares sent to any of the addresses, are consolidated into a single message sent to the primary address. In addition, when the recipient goes to the website to see the new photos, they will easily be able to navigate to other albums in the same folder. In the current state of the art, each album share is seen as an isolated message, and recipients are not able to easily group related shares.